BEINGS 2015: Biotech and the Ethical Imagination

In an attempt to reimagine the aspirations of biotechnology, and to develop important questions, the Emory University Center for Ethics organized an international summit. It billed itself as “a gathering of global thought leaders to reach consensus on the direction of biotechnology for the 21st century.”

BEINGS 2015was the first in a series of such summits, and focused its attention primarily on cellular biotechnology. The summit brought together a distinguished faculty of thought leaders and 200 delegates from 30 countries, drawn from visionary thinkers in the sciences, engineering, policymaking and government, industry, law, philosophy, religion, the humanities, and the arts.

Goals of the conference included:

To establish an aspirational vision for the highest and most desirable uses of new cellular biotechnologies.

To reach consensus on reasonable guidelines for cellular biotechnologies such as synthetic biology and stem cell research, as well as animal and human applications of these biotechnologies.

The guiding questions of the summit were:

What should be the goals of biotechnology; is progress itself an ethical aim or obligation? How do we honor the sanctity of life (assuming that “sanctity of life” continues to be a morally useful construct)? What is “human flourishing” insofar as biotechnology can contribute to it?

How do we navigate the spectrum of differing perspectives on risk, such as those that take a more precautionary, risk-aversive approach to those that privilege provable harm approaches?

How do we protect vulnerable populations, honor global cultural differences, and respect and include diverse opinions?

Last year’s heritable human gene editing scandal continues to reverberate. He Jiankui remains under investigation in China, where authorities have confirmed his work but the extent of his punishment remains unclear, possibly because of some ambiguity in the applicable regulations. He has definitely been fired by his university.

In the US, both Rice University and Stanford are formally investigating faculty members whose involvement with the work may have been more extensive than first thought. Michael Deem of Rice was revealed...

After the heritable human gene editing headlines of late 2018, and considering that the stakes include the future of human biology and the prospect of a new high-tech eugenics, it is no surprise that discussions have continued. What was not widely anticipated, however, was the emergence of a connection between old-school transhumanism, mutated into biohacking, and modern cryptocurrency, in the service of monetizing “the production of designer babies and human germline genetic engineering.”